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Cited by 440

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A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation

Open access
Pevzner, Lev, Hearst, Marti A.·2002·Computational Linguistics

Abstract

The P k evaluation metric, initially proposed by Beeferman, Berger, and Lafferty (1997), is becoming the standard measure for assessing text segmentation algorithms. However, a theoretical analysis of the metric finds several problems: the metric penalizes false negatives more heavily than false positives, overpenalizes near misses, and is affected by variation in segment size distribution. We propose a simple modification to the P k metric that remedies these problems. This new metric—called Window Diff—moves a fixed-sized window across the text and penalizes the algorithm whenever the number of boundaries within the window does not match the true number of boundaries for that window of text.

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Metadata

Authors
Pevzner, L., & Hearst, M. A.
Venue
Computational Linguistics
Published
2002-03
Volume
28
Issue
1
Pages
19-36
ISSN
  • 0891-2017 (ISSN-L)
  • 1530-9312
OpenAlex
W2159083595
Cited by
440
References
0
FWCI
6.69
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/089120102317341756
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Pevzner, L., & Hearst, M. A. (2002). A Critique and Improvement of an Evaluation Metric for Text Segmentation. Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1162/089120102317341756

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